On a hill’s northern side...
Where from sea-blasts the hawthorns lean
And hoary dews are slow to melt.
“The muffled clamour of the outside world only reached the secluded farmhouse at Racedown after long delay”—in other words, letters were delivered there but once a week; and on one occasion at least Wordsworth asks to have a book franked, otherwise he will “not be able to release it from the post-office.” A part of this time was given to gardening, and, no doubt from motives of economy, almost all the meals consisted of vegetables. “I have been lately living,” he writes, “upon air and the essence of carrots, cabbages, turnips, and other esculent vegetables, not excluding parsley.”[75] At another time he sets forth to warm himself, like Goody Blake, by gathering sticks strewn upon the road by the gale; and his habit was to take a two hours’ stroll every morning, and now and then a long expedition on foot. He and his sister, as the Cumberland peasants said, were “a deal upo’ the road,” and many times they must have walked more than forty miles in the day. There is a story still current in the neighbourhood that Wordsworth once borrowed a horse to ride into Lyme Regis, and returned on foot, having forgotten the horse! With all its hardships and frugalities, Dorothy Wordsworth loved Racedown. It was “the place dearest to (her) recollections upon the whole surface of the island,” and she speaks warmly of the scenery on Pillesdon, Lewesdon, and the view of the sea from Lambert’s Castle—which is said by some to be the view of the county.
Landor’s thought, that “when a language grows up all into stalk, and its flowers begin to lose somewhat of their character, we must go forth into the open fields, through the dingles, or among the mountains, for fresh seed,” would have been endorsed by both Wordsworth and Barnes alike, but with very different ideas as to what was considered fresh seed. Barnes’ innovation was an innovation of the letter rather than the spirit, the literary use of the local dialect which he heard in his boyhood, and which, he said, was spoken in the greatest purity in villages and hamlets of the secluded Vale of Blackmore, a valley so secluded that its life was practically the life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the nineteenth was far advanced. He attributes his poems’ freedom from “slang and vice” to this seclusion; but it is as much due to his personal[76] preference of light to darkness. His rustics are, as a rule, happy people.
William Barnes.
At Rushay, William Barnes spent his early days, and he was educated at the day school at Sturminster Newton. Somewhere along the road from Bagber to Sturminster was a haunted house, about the exact locality of which he gave no information beyond that a “dark, gloomy lane led to it.” He once pointed out the lane to grand-children as the place their “great-grandfather was riding down, when all at once he saw the ghost in the form of a fleece of wool, which rolled along mysteriously by itself till it got under the legs of his horse, and the horse went lame from that hour, and for ever after.” Barnes was of pure Dorset[77] stock. His long life was lived almost entirely in Dorset; and when at Mere, in Wiltshire, a stone’s throw from his own county, he “always yearned for Dorset and Dorchester.” Latterly he lived near Dorchester, where, until 1882, “few figures were more familiar to the eye in the county town of Dorset on a market day than an aged clergyman, quaintly attired in caped cloak, knee-breeches and buckled shoes, with a leather satchel slung over his shoulders and a stout staff in his hand. He seemed usually to prefer the middle of the street to the pavement, and to be thinking of matters which had nothing to do with the scene before him. He plodded along with a broad, firm tread, notwithstanding the slight stoop occasioned by years. Every Saturday morning he might have been seen thus trudging up the narrow South Street, his shoes coated with mud according to the state of the roads between his rural home and Dorchester, and a little grey dog at his heels, till he reached the four crossways in the centre of the town. Halting there, opposite the public clock, he would pull his old-fashioned watch from its deep fob and set it with great precision to London time.”
An unusual union of scholar and poet, his little Dutch pictures are free from the dull undertone of the conventional manner that Burns occasionally fell into. Indeed, he has more affinity with the Provençal poet and lexicographer, Mistral, than with Burns or Béranger, with whom he is usually compared. He is perhaps mistaken in his belief that the Dorset dialect is “altogether as fit a vehicle of rustic feeling and thought as the Doric as found in the Idyllics of Theocritus.” But, after making this exception about the “fitness” of his Doric, there remains in his clear, untroubled poems of still life, in his unaffected eclogues, no small affinity with Theocritus. There is a charm in his limitations; he belongs not to England, but to Dorset; not to Dorset, but to the Vale of Blackmore, where the slow, green river, his “cloty” Stour, with its deep pools whence leaps the may-fly undisturbed by anglers, is the stream dearest to his memory.
Barnes was Mr. Hardy’s near neighbour and personal friend—Mr. Hardy’s house is less than a mile from the Rectory of Winterborne Came—and both have been interpreters of the life—especially of the vanished life—and character of their pastoral county. In every other respect they are as different as is “Egdon” Heath from Blackmore Vale.